March 22, 2013

Steubenville Meets the 24-hour News Cycle

By Jonathan Wynn

You are likely familiar with
the Steubenville, Ohio case where two teenaged boys were recently convicted of
raping a young woman.

There have been some great
sociological analyses about it. Sarah Sobieraj wrote an OpEd on the ”digital
residue” of the case highlighting how social media drew the story out into the
light of day, Evan Stewart wrote at The Society Pages on our male-dominated society, the UK’s Guardiandiscusses the town’s economic woes, and Lisa Wade
wrote about the media’s response to the verdict.

On the last angle, I don’t
know about you, but my Facebook page blew up with anger over the media’s
response. As the verdict came in, CNN anchor Candy Crowley and her correspondent,
Poppy Harlow, expressed sympathy for the two boys whose lives were forever
changed by the verdict (watch it here). Harlow
solemnly intoned:

Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like
me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising
futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they
believed their lives fell apart. One of the young men, when
that sentence came down, Ma’lik collapsed. He collapsed in the arms of his
attorney... He said to him, “My life is over. No one is going to want me now.“ Very
serious crime here, both found guilty of raping the sixteen-year-old girl at a
series of parties back in August. Alcohol-infused parties…

Crowley’s further questioning
was concerned with the “lasting effect on two young men.”

Some of my friends were angry
these reporters seemed to openly lament the judicial system that worked. “What,”
other friends wondered, “about the life of the young woman who was raped? What
about the lasting effect on her life?”
CNN’s coverage led to outrage (there’s even an online petition
asking for an apology), although NBC, ABC, and USA Today were apparently no better.

When critiquing the media it
is important to understand the ”rules of the game.“ This is something I learned
from On Television, a 1996 lecture by
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu broadcast on French public television, about
how television news works. For example, a rule of the game is that news looks for the ”man
bites dog” story. The “dog bites man” story is common and journalists, Bourdieu notes, “are interested in the
exception, which means whatever is exceptional for them.”

For another example: news media doesn’t
require the smartest people to participate, but rather requires “fast thinkers”
who perform best as the cameras roll. Paramount
in these rules is that television news, particularly in the 24-hour news cycle,
requires sensation. It seeks out stories that stoke emotional connections. On
that point, Crowley and Harlow’s personal empathy with the perpetrators makes
more sense.

Because of the custom of protecting of
the victim (anonymously named "Jane Doe") one of the only ways the media can
draw out this sensationalist story is exploit the only available resources: the
tragic personal journey of two good looking, clean cut, young Ma’lik Richmond
and Trent Mays. This, for Bourdieu, is a kind of invisible censorship because the victim’s story was out of bounds. (There
are very good reasons for this. Even
though there are protections, such as the Violence Against Women Act’s ”rape
shield law,” media outlets do have First Amendment protection to report a victim’s name, as Fox News initially did.
Still, it is customary for media not
to disclose the name due to the chilling effect it would have for other victims
to come forward. Here is a more
law-oriented discussion of this issue.)

It reminds me of research on how
these rules of the game lead local news to highlight more violent crimes and street
crimes. White-collar crimes are harder stories to tell for television news: they
are less sensational, more likely to be drawn out in dull courtroom proceedings,
and therefore, less likely to attract the media spotlight.

But, they are also committed
by a different group of people. Through an absence (or invisible censorship)
similar to the Steubenville case, we, as viewers, grow accustomed to seeing only
part of the story. Only certain crimes and certain perpetrators get displayed (i.e.,
African-American, poor, etc.) while others are hidden. Barry Glassner’s The Culture
of Fear is one of my favorite
books, because it highlights a variety of what we think we’re afraid of with
similar what we should be thinking of
instead. (For example, we worry about ”road rage” when we should be worried
that cars are a very unsafe mode of transportation.)

Glassner also explains that
even though the media stokes fears of
African-American males, African-American males are more likelyto be victims of crime than they are to be perpetrators, and they are
also are at greater risk of health issues, employment discrimination, for
example, than the media portrays.

Reports of street crime
differentiate based upon race. There has been a lotofgreatresearch on
this, but take a look at this image which
illustrates how victims of gun violence are reported by the Chicago Tribune. The handwritten analysis
of the news item reads: “One person shot in white neighborhood, 370 words.
Four shot in black neighborhoods, 23 words (six words a person).” (The online
commentator later notes that there is a significant Latino population in the
first neighborhood, which only illustrates invisible censorship further.)

Being a sociologist means not thinking
solely about more individualistic explanations, but rather considering the structural
issues in the media’s reporting of issues of gender, sex, race, and crime.
After reading Bourdieu’s work, it is harder to lay a full load of blame on
Crowley, Harlow, and other talking heads. It would be hard to deny there is a
tragic and potentially dangerous level of victim-blaming and sympathy for
convicted rapists going on in the Steubenville case, even though the CNN journalists were women. Individualistic explanations shouldn’t, therefore, distract
us when we should be thinking about the media apparatus in addition to
analyzing why rape is so common in our broader culture (according to the Department
of Justice, as of 2012, 1 in 5
college women are raped, and only 26% of those say their assailant was a stranger).

In 1996, when Bourdieu wrote ,there
was no social media, and if he were alive he would likely have to amend his On Television to address not only how
social media brought the story into the light (let’s not forget the role the hacking collective Anonymous played), but also how social media allows everyday folk to
directly engage with and critique the media. That’s a structural change. With
this in mind, what else do you feel the media can do?

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Comments

Your post made me think about our local news media. In a town with several military bases and plenty of crime, it is far more common to hear a perpetrator's race reported than to hear that they are military. There seems to be some unwritten rule about not making the military look bad.